Burnt To Soot
by The Fairweather League
Summary: There had been times of ravage upon the land where Sherlock was concerned, audacious and unruly as he very well had the capacity to be, but the circumstances now were unfamiliar territory. It was a lamentable thing that the man would not recognise, but the fact did nevertheless remain absolute: he was not the British Government.


Sherlock's eyes were blue. They were blue as the Caribbean, a translucent population of phytoplankton and mirrored green rays of chlorophyll, and Mycroft had revelled in his younger years making them shine white at the edges, reflections of Antarctic light upon the trembling, cold waters of its shell; wood decks could not survive the waves of the southern hemisphere, nor the black Baltic seas which the Vikings had dared to venture, and so he had sunk the boy's ship; it was the natural order of ways.

It had never angered him truly, the losses. Assets and pirated treasures gone, goods sunk deep inside the ocean and destined never again to meet the shore. Pearly white seashells of bathtub plastic; yellow rubber ducks; the fattest, the singularly largest gold doubloons with the black-coated skulls and elbow bones of humans, etched upon the surfaces with permanent marker and illegal kitchen knives.

Mycroft had seen Sherlock at it, crafting this medium of artistic creation long ago in his depths of childhood, before turning roads to cross with slow viola notes, with cloudy, smoking cigarette sticks turned fire-like at their fronts. Sherlock did not wear red or purple hats or blooming, tropic bird feathers, neither had he elected ever to craft paper swords, but he made pirate money with highlighters and ships of shredded willow and pine, where he glued sticks to the decks and tied tissues upright, as though white flags of surrender rather than masts.

There had been curly-haired Sherlock, kneeling on thin, blue pyjama-clad legs, he gripping Redbeard's long dark hairs as the panting dog lolled a wet tongue and stepped upon his brothers surrounding books, all open and vulnerable: Tales of Peter Pan and history novels, and the white pages would have been reduced to shreds, had the mutt's nails not been cut until bleeding; Mycroft, at 13 years, had been a rigid figure against the doorway to the room, and later in his recalling observations he found no chemistry volumes or titles describing _Murders of the Century._

Mycroft, remembering with eidetic clearness of memory, knew the bedroom well. Opposite of his elder sibling, the young Sherlock was indifferent to messiness. Messy floor, messy bed, messy closet. Messy surroundings, all 3-dimensional splashes within the four white walls, a spectrum of youth. Plush toys, their surfaces stiff with animal saliva and red hairs, books taking crooked, stacked forms and broken spines, prone to toppling off the desk and over its sides, spilling to the floor and to the spinning chair nearby. Prized artworks portraying seas and bearded men with hooks for hands were pinned with primary-colour tacks upon the wall opposite Sherlock's poster bed. The covers were in revolting disarray, stripes of red and blue sown within its sheets, and fluffed pillows were without a recognised place.

Very often, in his youngest years, Mycroft had threatened not to enter the room due to its shameful, childish state, a terrible thing for any territory to be; personal rooms of this sort were meant for bed frames and slumber, not littered piles, as he perceived the area to be. It was unconventional, almost bohemian, this disorganization, and therefore, it was absolutely unacceptable as well.

Though the Holmes family could be considered by no stretch of the imagination typically English, (or conventional by any other nationality standards, mind) from the mathematician mother of the household to her more ordinary husband and genius sons, forever, one similarity to all relationships between childhood brothers would remain commonplace, and that was simply the adoration thrust upon the older Mycroft by the younger Sherlock. _Imitation is the highest form of flattery_ , Mrs. Holmes had stated with patience and compromising intentions to a scowling Mycroft, and surely if the youngest Holmes could not be one such member of the phrase, the words in themselves were entirely meaningless.

Sherlock, though his eating habits had consisted of small portions and large gaps between meals, had acquired similar tastes of food to Mycroft when beginning to fully divulge his cravings, and it was easy to see in the calming serenity of suppertime the miniscule, quick glances of Sherlock, watching his brother eat, focusing his eyes afterwards on the dinner plate before him, as he struggled to work his toddler fists (and so small they were, the hands of a child) correctly, and the fork or knife or spoon he held with his jagged movements. In a foolish attempt to straighten his hair, to force it down and to comb it with the neatness as Mycroft accomplished effortlessly, Sherlock had created a right mess of his hair, tangled to an extreme point as it was when Mycroft was left with no choice but to correct this folly, and he had thought bitterly in those moments that the air was filled with a whining, sobbing Sherlock how much easier it would be for them all if only the boy's mop of hair was cut, or better yet, shaven entirely.

It was indeed true that many of his sibling's actions resulted in dire consequence, sticky gum in pockets or certain wrath, but Mycroft would not be such a fool as to think no upsides came of such a dependent relationship. Sherlock had been young, he had been desperate to gain the admiration of his brother, and he, as a result, was at those times easy to deceive.

And so Mycroft had adapted; he had learned to make the utmost advantage of this newly gained power. With carefully measured, adult sternness, he could pass threats, mild things, really, in those simpler times of primary school. Sherlock's room and all its random heaps of objects, that could be changed with turned backs and disappointed sighs over steepled hands; Mycroft had within his ability that of a blackmailing man, or a much beloved dictator, ruling quietly and benevolently as he sat upon his red-streaked throne.

Sherlock did rebel, at certain intervals of time, but it was not a common occurrence. Sometimes he cried. He had tendencies to sniffle, and to lie upon his stomach above Mycroft's carpeted, white floor for many hours on end, unmoving as the time dragged, and then he himself was too eventually by his worried father, triggered by one son's sudden disappearance, until politely informed of the unfortunate situation by another.

Those particular scenes, those which he held within his expanding mind (if ever he was a different man, Mycroft might have thought them precious like jewels, glistening in what was love) and offered explicit signs craving his attention, the stories repeated themselves, monotone now as he aged, and Mycroft could not seem to shake them. How frequently they would appear, bothersome with the dip of his head or the shrewd curling of his fingers, until banished to the outlands of his memories by _his_ face and _his_ eyes.

It was always his eyes, always. It was a constant. For Mycroft pondered nowadays on the middle-aged subject frequently, and by his own scrutiny Sherlock was a _he_ , and his body was an _it,_ having no brain of its own; simply a means of transportation. His face was long and ivory and imperial. The shape had changed and its fat cheeks had withered with the passage of time; jutting cheekbones were now indecently obvious; the body had grown long, stretched legs and wore commonly black and deep, velvety reds. But the eyes stayed the same, and the pair had not altered since his childish attention to Sherlock had depleted fully.

It had been incredibly difficult at times, Mycroft had found, during his earliest departure, with the loss of Sherlock; or at the very least, the loss of his normalised presence. At an age when the boy, now The Man, had made many common, general appearances throughout his days (from his baby form swaddled in blue cocoons to the harsher sounds of his untrained hand, an assault upon the exquisite instrument, the violin), his absence posed obstacles, though admittedly relieved Mycroft was when the opportunity arose to leave The House, he had not fully foreseen the nearby consequences.

With blissful, voluntary moments of solitude, a beautiful, a sweet white-chocolate flavour of an experience, smoothly flowing cream in its moments and buttery vanilla air, came to him more. The likes of which, this sensation, something that he had yet to define and read only in books and recognised in others; it was an entirely irrational sort of thing: typical, irritating. A bug. Similar very much, as he saw it, to the kin sentiment.

Mycroft favoured above all in his character the pursuit of rationality and logic, unable as he has been always to lie in his own head, and as a result he could indeed not deny the creeping, the short-spiked quivers under his skin: he grew lonely; he had grown lonely.

He was still lonely.

But it was no matter. The Man Sherlock had been so kind in his recent visit (though it might have been far away, Mycroft couldn't know; time was a slippery subject, and he had had always an unusual ineptitude to view it personally, to coat it with strong bias) as to announce the truth himself, deduction only though the shameful humanity was to him. Mycroft was able now to look upon the recollection, filing through the memories as if they were all coated in equal shades of ancientness, while stumbling occasionally upon Sherlock's kid bedroom or his own. Similarly to his abundant other experiences, he would relish jealously in their casualness. Because nothing mattered now, he could see it in a bitter clarity; Magnussen had drawn his cards and had been killed due to it, his ace a living beating, shrivelled black heart that had shed its blood deep within the very roots of the paper white background England, and Sherlock murdered him. Shot him in the forehead while the Shark Man's eyes were at their deadest, and in his rotting they finally shined, if deceased and seeming to be marine marbles.

If Mycroft were there with him now in his death carriage, the little boy, immature man, instead of sitting in this, his, room, examining the smoothened rifts atop his umbrella's cane, (firstly totally non-existent and shining the polished polyester wood it was composed of, until becoming prominent ridges) and sitting in his leather chair by a nearby fire, what a wondrous opportunity would befall him. A chance it might have been, Sherlock would be once more at the butt of consequence. Nothing would change; Mycroft had been assured of this with frequency by the passage of his years, but perhaps …

He did not shake his head, but he did touch his face to banish the thought, thumb beneath his jaw, where he applied pressure to the area of his skin and felt the stubborn fat still present, four long fingers grazing lightly above his eyelids and harder, more harshly, over the surface of his cheekbones. A common act of humiliation, and he leaned forward until he might have swayed and toppled onto the hard floor. The prominent, the bluest interlocking stems of veins in his white hands had become stretched as he traced the appendage over wrinkles covering his forehead and buried his face in its palm, crow's nose pushing against the contact.

That's what it was, a signal of protest. Mycroft, with a prodigious effort, leaned back until he was sure his back touched the chair, whilst his arms were splayed across the chair and, most importantly, he could not touch his face. Or his eyes: free from the peach of him, he could rove them effortlessly where he pleased. They touched upon the office; fireplace alight in direct gaze and blazing with flames, from burgundy red to orange and yellow while blue licked at its centre, a sun's diagram, contained within metal and neatly cleaned brick. A desk was obscured in a pool of shadow, and could not be seen properly. There was a table separating Mycroft from a couch across his own seat; it was created from the same leather material he used, without exception, for all seats, in his studies. The floor was shining ebony. The walls were mature and green, lined with mahogany.

He could have played deduction in this room, he might have, but Mycroft had distracted himself with it so many times, and all that could be seen in the space, he had memorised long ago. The spotlessness of the place, (an OCD symptom; that was what Sherlock described it to be, but he was no better source of reference for his mentality than Mycroft was himself, as the hawk-eyed man convinced himself when the baritone voice nagged at the edges of his ponderings, uninvited) its organisation. All files were categorised standardly, by an A-Z arrangement, if one were to search through the harsh metal cabinets at the walls. He was a government employee, connected to it personally; there were plans in his drawers and laptop, and rewards were pinned to a board at the back of his wall, hidden to the inattentive eye. No carpet was spread across the floor; his desk chair did not spin; he had no photographs here.

Mycroft, with no will of his own, found his attention wandering, back to the fire, though he could not, did not see it. The logs within crackled, and an impending blackness spread across the wood. He could smell the ash burn, detecting the wafting smoke as it rang triggers through his mind like bells: in his head, stuffy in his nose and clinging to his grey suit. Mycroft had not noticed himself basking in its blaze, inhuman hands of tendrils of colour beyond its confinement, searching, meaning to touch his cheeks and lull him into a state of comatose, a romantic scent of scorching…

…The idea slipped within his mind again, and it startled him in that manner all untamed thoughts do, and required an enormous effort on Mycroft to consider it further. _But perhaps…_

But perhaps there was an existing possibility that Sherlock may yet become adult. Mycroft relished in the words; it couldn't be rushed. He must plan; he must comprehend the slightest of details in its birth, and spell it in his head, so he could be sure. An unlikely consideration, as it hadn't burrowed its way into his imagination, it couldn't possibly have, for he had pondered upon the possibility so many times before. It simply had only remerged from the dregs.

Of course, Mycroft was forced to realise again suddenly, unpleasantly, there would be no time for that. Years, that's what it would take for the stubborn mule to come round. And he had only six months, he and Sherlock.

Mycroft growled very slightly, quietly, and he did not know why; the sky had grown dark, emerged already as it was into an oppressive nighttime, and a steady rain began to pour. Hitting the windows at the walls as though bullets, with a peculiar wan sheen of it as the droplets ran in rivers down to the streets, descending, by gravity's reinforcement to its own needy jaws. It could not be stopped; the force was a necessity of the law, a burdensome, if merciful power, which kept the planets aligned and bent both light and backs and was wondrously beautiful in its workings. Gravity and the stars and its flowing complexities held no similar bearings to the workings of political beings, Mycroft knew, studying the downpour, yet he without bias understood both.

Certain positions in certain governments might only stretch their reaches so far before split, and in his murder Sherlock, with such an uncommonly wide variety of possibilities his future contained, had miraculously reduced the decisions to two: a prison sentence, or otherwise his untimely, and as he would certainly think, undignified death. The fool man had had no say in this outcome, and Mycroft was without the proper capabilities to save him.

But he did have six months; six months to survive and gather clues, where Mycroft may watch through those eyes until they would assuredly burn into nonbeing, wondering all the way when his brother would begin to struggle in his strict clutches, when Mycroft would undoubtedly be forced to become alert and tyrannical; as their positions have proved now, he has no choice.

Sincerely, Mycroft wished with unpleasant fervor that he was mistaken in his calculations. Yet he knew the hope was in vain; he did not make mistakes, and as such was never dealt the responsibility of correcting them.

His coolness weakened, Mycroft did not bear the brunt of his thoughts any longer, it constricting his chest and dealing sharp, painful blows in his head, a reminder of pungent failure. _They_ forced themselves upon the windowpanes harder, and without thought _._ He saw the light bleed through the room, across his tight face, just one second before he heard its crash, like breaking shards of glass across the London landscape. It was not dimmed even by the traffic below and by the honking of impatient car horns as it struck once more: one, two, three, four, five times, and then stillness.

The fire popped and shredded at its black logs. A smell ignited Mycroft was sure he could not mistake as tobacco smoke, a lingering ghost of a drug still a reality, and the thunder and the lightning's last roar was the brightest, loudest, most desperate of all he had heard this night. The sixth was jagged. It was not slow. The crashes had ceased; the rain did not.

Before Mycroft was given some opportunity to collect himself (for he had become stiff and anxious, his fingers curling tensely at the arms of his chair, which surely he would have peeled, had his nails not been neat, and it was painful to close his eyes, so he instead snapped them to trace the fire or the rain as it fell and was replenished) the air rang. The sound seemed to him to be harsh, incomparable to the dulled strikes of light present not long before, and his hands bulged as they quit their clawing.

 _The leather is nubuck, expensive, coated in an aniline layer. It reflects the light of the fire and is dulled in particular areas an amber discolouration._ He could think of nothing to calm him further, he had in his possession no tranquilisers, had no time remaining, and to leave the knocked door unanswered would be horribly unbusiness-like, and as a result adjusted and straightened his tie, which, Mycroft assured himself, was silk and darkly coloured. Black, precisely: to the English a shade of mourning.

He did not clear his throat. Nor did he stand from his seat. She was at the door, he knew; Mycroft recognised the knock. But it was meant to be soft and it was meant to be careful, rather than the horrid, deathly sounds held true by its lasting echoes, in his ears, vibrating his hands so it was difficult to control the inevitable trembling.

Instead, he said easily, mechanically, "Come in."

So she did. Madeleine had no great number of skins; (not including her random, other self Anthea, such an unsuitable name for the assistant) but each was formal, most often dresses, dark and black or blue or the more uncommon purples and reds. Standing in Mycroft's doorway as she was now, donning finely woven navy, new, not particularly long, or short; the simple clothing covered her ankles. She dawdled in the doorway, just a short moment longer than was usual with her general confidence, even within his menacing, dominating presence, clearly hesitant. Her arms were at her sides and seemed awkward and unneeded, and the woman did not know what was most appropriate to do with the limbs. The lipstick was not so bright a cherry red as expected, or so full, and she was indeed remarkably pale. Her hair was pulled into honey strands of a bun at the top of her head, stripes of it turned dark by the dimly lit outside.

"Mr. Holmes," she stated, unmoving in her position, though her sombre face slipped into surprise and discomfort as Mycroft stood to face her with vaguely miserable features quickly becoming nothing with such a finality she felt she must have imagined the expression. It was, after all, only what was to be expected in the process. "Lady Smallwood has accepted your request to meet, all conditions approved, concerning the subject of Sherlock Holmes."

Madeleine had whispered his, the other's, name; her lips had twisted and moved a miniscule amount, and her dark eyes were squinted and plagued with worry, sadness. Mycroft did not indulge her sympathies with any morose response. Said conference was only a necessity. Formality.

He replied smoothly, "Thank you, Madeleine. And that will be all?"

"Yes, sir. That's all."

"Good. You may leave." Mycroft allowed her a nod of his head in an appreciation for this news, but she did not take her leave. She seemed to be struggling, thinking, a painful thing to witness, and bit her lip, anxious. Madeleine watched an expectant Mycroft, shifting her legs and the black flats slipped on her feet, seeming to wish to say something, (she would ask no questions, of this Mycroft was sure) but evidently, and rightly, she decided her thoughts would fall upon deaf ears, and turned to leave, shutting the door softly. The sound brought no dread upon Mycroft as had her entrance done, but he experienced no relief, either. It seemed a worthless feat, to feel now. With Madeleine's arrival, Mycroft became cool once more. As he knew, no good could be done by the disposing of the hard shell.

The chair remained in its place, expectant, the cushion caved slightly where its inhabitant had sat brooding, but Mycroft did not touch the furniture. He paid it no heed as he passed, standing in front of the dying fireplace.

It was nothing, not any more. All within the hearth had been burned to ash, or reduced instead to shapeless smoked objects. Mycroft stared into it for a moment, thinking, planning; his pupils did not move to examine the blackened site.

For the first time that night, Mycroft uttered a small sigh. Nearby, resting and in wait, was a fireplace shovel. He grabbed it, meticulously separating the lump of logs inside and pouring ash upon their surfaces, afterwards placing the small tool to its original place, and then turning to latch shut the gold-framed glass door, rubbing his hands together for a moment.

He could still hear the rain, and it had not lessened in its intensity. The light from the embers had fled, and already to the Holmes man the room seemed a bit colder.

The job finished, Mycroft retrieved his umbrella from its place by the chair, shut off the nearest lamp, and, in the deceiving serenity of the room, Mycroft walked to the door, opened it, and did not glance back to the emptiness as the knob was locked shut behind his retreating footsteps.


End file.
